Wallops launch scheduled for about 1 p.m. Thursday

In the past month, it’s been one delay after another in efforts to launch the Antares rocket from Wallops Island in the first of eight official commercial resupply missions to the International Space Station.

But for officials at Orbital Sciences Corp., the Dulles-based company that built the Antares and the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, frustration is just part of the job.

“This is an interesting business we’re in,” Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson said Wednesday. “Airplanes don’t always go on time, you can’t land when you want — this is just an offshoot of aviation, only more complex … Sometimes you just don’t get off the ground when you want to.”

Orbital has wanted the Antares to get off the ground since early December, but time and again outside forces appear to have conspired against it. Late last month, station astronauts had to conduct two spacewalks to replace a failed cooling pump. Early this week, a polar vortex dropped down from Canada and plunged most of this country into a rare deep-freeze.

Then on Monday the sun began to flare.

Electronics aboard the Antares are particularly vulnerable to solar activity, explained Orbital’s chief technical officer Antonio Elias, so the event caught his attention, and he kept an eye out for more.

Sure enough, a second jump came early Tuesday afternoon, he said, so they decided to play it safe and pull the plug again early Wednesday.

“We are concerned about mission failure,” Elias said, so Orbital and NASA opted to wait for a day “when the sun is a little quieter.”

Barring more flares, that could come as early as Thursday and a launch window starting at 1:07 p.m., NASA said.

State official Dale K. Nash said the delays are no reflection of Virginia’s suitability for such launches. The cooling loop problem was aboard the ISS, while the Arctic vortex was a 20-year fluke. And the solar flare is the largest in more than a decade, affecting the entire planet.

“Virginia has an abundance of favorable weather for launching rockets, as evidenced by the 16,000 successful launches from Wallops since the 1950s,” Nash said. “The probability for launch on any given day in Virginia is not significantly less — and may even be better — than other ranges around the world.”

Nash heads the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, which oversees the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, or MARS, built at Wallops to accommodate the Antares and other medium-lift rockets.

Before coming to Virginia, Nash said he worked for 14 years launching Space Shuttles out of Florida, where summer thunderstorms, seasonal tropical storms and hurricanes routinely create weather delays and challenges.

Still, in the time Orbital has dealt with delays with the Antares, its competitor in ISS commercial resupply, California-based SpaceX, launched its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket twice from Florida’s Cape Canaveral.

The Falcon 9 is the booster SpaceX uses in its ISS resupply missions, although neither launch in the last five weeks was for resupply. The first, on Dec. 3, was its first launch into geostationary transfer orbit, while the second on Monday was to insert a broadcasting satellite into high-altitude orbit. That satellite happens to have been built by Orbital.

If the Antares launches Thursday, the Cygnus with its payload of equipment, spare parts and science experiments could still make its Jan. 12 rendezvous with the space station, Culbertson said. After that, the weather becomes more problematic.

If it doesn’t launch by Friday, he said, “we’ll have to have a serious discussion with NASA as to whether to unload (the Cygnus).”

“This is what we deal with in this world,” said Culbertson. “And we want to point out that this isn’t a failure of the system. It isn’t a problem in the system. This is pretty unique. It is a delay, but it’s only a delay in the success that will come as a result of this mission.”

Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.

Antares launch

The Antares rocket is next scheduled to launch from Wallops Island no earlier than 1:07 p.m. Thursday, NASA said Wednesday.